


you showed me colours (you know I can't see with anyone else)

by prestonsarchives



Category: The Haunting of Bly Manor (TV)
Genre: F/F, but like. call it a metaphor, for the stages of grief? idk man, look i don't really know what this is
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-13
Updated: 2021-01-13
Packaged: 2021-03-18 00:34:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,533
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28734297
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prestonsarchives/pseuds/prestonsarchives
Summary: Since Dani's been gone, Jamie's been suspended in her own world of black and white.Slowly, though — incredibly slowly, mind — the colours she's ached for will start to seep back in.It's a question, now, of waiting. Waiting for the world to be complete again.Waiting, for her lover to return.(or, in which jamie goes colourblind after her loss. starts to see colour again after a while, but colourblindness isn't easy on her.)
Relationships: Dani Clayton/Jamie
Comments: 9
Kudos: 32





	you showed me colours (you know I can't see with anyone else)

**Author's Note:**

> lots of english spellings in this, as in, colours instead of colors, sofa instead of couch, etc etc. 
> 
> on from that, though: call this a metaphor, for my own version of the stages of grief. red, as in anger, the fury that you feel when you lose someone who means everything, to you. orange, as in change, trying to move on from an inherently immovable thing. yellow, as in a manic sort of happiness that comes only when you try and accept the grief. green, as in realising that the world is still beautiful, no matter the ugly things it might throw at you. blue, as in sadness. The kind that hits you, after years and years and years of pushing it down.
> 
> purple, and you'll see when purple slides in. the last colour — the one that completes the world, entirely. 
> 
> here's my take on that, once again inspired from a taylor swift song i've been listening to on repeat. are we surprised?

* * *

look at this godforsaken mess that you made me  
you showed me colours you know I can't see with anyone else

— illicit affairs, ts

* * *

Jamie sees her, a little bit, in everything. Colours, though, mostly. Colours most of _all_ — Dani, who suffused like the shades of a sunrise through Jamie’s unsteady affair with monotony, her life until then. Even moonflowers — even moonflowers were only white. The whole world, another shade of grey.

And then, Dani Clayton, who had stumbled into Jamie’s life with a purple knit sweater and two startlingly blue eyes, an effortless blonde blowout that made Jamie wonder if this was what it was to stare unblinking at the sun. Dani Clayton who stumbled back out of it, skin stained grey by the shadows which that same sun could not hope to reach.

It takes years — is it nine? — until Jamie starts to see colours again.

_Red._ Red, and almost a decade has passed, a life lived for so long in its absence that Jamie does a double take when she first sees it. Burns her eyes, almost, so stark against everything else that she has to blink twice before she registers it. She’s in a bookshop, surreptitious as possible as her gaze flicks over the _gay and lesbian literature_ section — why, she thinks, there has to be a separate section for such books when the whole point of this modern take on things is that love is, inherently, love — and rests on the cover of a book. _The_ book. Rubyfruit Jungle, a blazing red flower backed by another colour she thinks might be yellow (can’t see it yet, doesn’t have the mind to). _Dani’s favourite,_ and the thought hits her so hard that she stumbles back, gasping, drawing attention that she doesn’t particularly want right now, not in this corner of the shop. A clerk raises his eyebrows at her, summoning the role of librarian to mind even though — and Jamie resists the urge to spit back at his evidently-homophobic glare — _this isn’t a fucking library._

She mouths an apology. She also flips the bird at him from under the table, but he doesn’t see that. _Rubyfruit Jungle,_ and Jamie’s forgotten quite how beautiful red is. Hasn’t forgotten the nights with Dani perched on the side of the bed, flicking through pages and reading out extracts she thinks Jamie’ll like, finishing the copy and slipping it pride-of-place onto an otherwise empty shelf. _I love reading,_ and the words had been remarkably wistful for something you might put on a resumé in the hopes of looking passably intelligent. _I love you,_ Jamie had replied, patting the pillow beside her and falling as easily more in love with Dani as she did into the steady rise and fall of her lover’s chest.

 _Red,_ she thinks again, staring at the shade until it starts fuzzing in her vision. Red — it’s an achingly loud colour, glowering up from the edges of Jamie’s vision as if to sharpen the edges of an invisibly drawn sword. It’s anger — the day Dani had said that Jamie would be better off without her and so their first genuine argument had ensued, _are you insane, Dani, look where I was before you came into my life._ It’s passion — the night they left Bly behind with no intent of staying anywhere apart from the seats of Jamie’s well-worn Jeep, intimacy without the need to be quiet (there are kids next door, there are people in the pub downstairs) and Dani had cried out louder than Jamie had ever heard her, as she curled her fingers for a final time. It’s _love,_ as furious as the colour looks, because all love is, is fury, when it comes down to it. A heart’s furious beat, more frustrated by the second that there is so much _feeling_ within and only one place to put it.

 _I don’t know what to do with it,_ Dani had whispered one night, and for a darkened moment Jamie had assumed she’d been talking about the weight of Viola’s presence. _With what?_ It’d been as coaxing as it was terrified.

 _All the love in my heart for you. Don’t know where to put it._ Jamie won’t admit it — she’d cried a little.

_I’ll take all of it for you, if you want._

_S’quite heavy. Not sure you’d keep wanting it, after a while._

_I wouldn’t mind._

Jamie reaches out, hands shaking even though she doesn’t really remember them starting to. The book is cool in her hands, cover smooth under calloused skin. _Red,_ and she was right before. It does burn a little. She welcomes it, really.

Time passes, after red, inescapably.

_Orange._ Orange, and she was only rifling through old vinyls to give to the bloody charity shop. They’ve been gathering dust, the discs, for years now, untouched as they were after Dani was gone. Hurt too much to play again, hurt too much to throw away — rehoming seems like the only viable option. A new life, and whoever owns them next will be free entirely from the concept of losing one’s wife to a vengeful lake spirit. It’s a nice thought. Orange, Jamie notices as she flicks back to a record she’d intended on skipping over, is like red, if red was a lesser thing. Orange is, simultaneously, nothing like red at all. She’s grown so used to seeing a world with just one colour now that she almost wants to shut her eyes and pretend that no other tone exists than the first. Eyes open, though, and the scale that ranges from amber to peach hasn’t faded at all.

She tugs the record from its sleeve — it’s not one that would otherwise jump out at her, Pink Floyd’s _Soundtrack for the Film “More”,_ a depiction of a windmill in some other colour and a sky which fades from red to orange to what Jamie assumes is yellow. Can’t see yellow yet, but the red-to-orange fade is reminder enough of a sunset that she has to set the record down. It’s been sixteen years now, since the loss, and specific memories are slightly blurry around the edges. Jamie doesn’t remember Dani dancing to any particular song apart from anything on the bloody _Grease_ soundtrack, but there are memories enough of her wife twirling around the kitchen in summer dresses or winter coats that the moment of reminiscence hurts anyway. _You should dance more often,_ she’d once murmured, watching quietly from her lean against the doorway, and Dani had frozen, sheepish. _Didn’t realise you were watching._ Jamie had smiled. _S’okay. Seen you in a few more compromising positions than this, Poppins._

 _Orange,_ a colour understated in comparison to red, making itself known anyway. It’s change — leaves helicoptering from trees in the months after summer, Dani racing across entire sidewalks to pounce on the crunchiest ones she could find, always coming back in a mostly-fake sulk if they weren’t ‘crispy enough’. It’s freedom — the first morning of waking up in the flat above The Leafling, dawn bathing everything in an incandescent bronze that Jamie never thought she’d live to see with another person. It’s laughter — the steady glow of the fire fading behind them as Dani and Jamie had made their way to the greenhouse, talking and giggling and staring so desperately that soon there was no talking at all. _Think you’re quite sane, considering._ She’d said it then — hadn’t been a line, not really, wasn’t her fault Dani had leaned forward and grasped hold of Jamie’s shoulders like they were all she had left to hang onto. _Maybe_ , she thinks, _they were_.

She stares at the sleeve until her eyes water, blinks, finally, tells herself that these are only tears borne of staring for too long. Not sadness. Can’t admit to sadness.

It’s twenty years until yellow. Twenty years of only seeing half of a sunset, gazing up at the palest patches of sky and finding grey to greet her. Jamie isn’t quite sure if she actually _wants_ any more colours in her life — any more reminders that slowly, things are coming back. Slowly, though she’ll never say it out loud, not for as long as she’s sane enough not to; she’s letting go. She’d been cooking eggs. Scrambling the orange yolks, pushing them around a non-stick pan that she’s somehow managing to stick things to anyway. She turns away, for a moment — to grab the salt, maybe, to find something to pair the otherwise-dull meal with, turns back, and baulks. Eggs, she knows, turn yellow when you scramble them. Yolks don’t stay orange.

Yellow’s gorgeous. She stares at it until something starts to burn, shoves a spatula into the wreckage to find a blackened sort of tar on the bottom half of this accidental omelette she’s just made. _Oh._ The pan’s trussed into a sink, still sizzling, cold water dashed across metal in the hope that nothing else gets cremated. She can’t stop _staring,_ though, at the mess in front of her, the _yellow,_ smoking as it may be. The street outside, when she looks, is dashed with streaks of what she remembers sunlight to be — it’s a faded version of the colour, though, closer to white — and _oh._ Oh, because this might be her favourite of the shades she’s seen again so far. It’s so _bright,_ the same sort of brightness that Dani carried around with her until those last few weeks, a tone which looks as though it’d be laughing if it could make a noise. It’s happiness — it’s Dani picking buttercups off of the side of the road in Bly and holding them under Jamie’s chin, some superstition depending on whether or not the petals glowed. It’s energy — racing each other through the start of the day to the other side of the park nearby, crashing into streams of sunlight as if such exhilaration was something entirely boundless, scrambling into the woods whenever that ache to hold each other became too strong to push into the nearby river. It’s music — _Yellow,_ the Coldplay song, which had come out the year Dani had… gone. They’d had time to listen to it, spinning around the living room, stumbling into the coffee table, crashing into the sofa once the exertion of dancing for as long as they did became too much. Laughing, but quietly. Laughter didn’t come so easily, any more.

Dani, humming the lyrics as she pressed into Jamie on their worn couch, trying not to think about _for you I’d bleed myself dry,_ trying to ignore the symbolism in _your skin and bones, turn into something beautiful_ — she’d tensed, only once, _barely,_ and Jamie was up at the record player in seconds, pulling the disk away.

_S’okay. You’re alright, Poppins. Here with me, remember?_

Steady hands, coming to cradle the lines of Dani’s jaw.

_You’re here._

Jamie straightens up, picks the pan of eggs up, tries to block out these _fucking_ memories — _Dani,_ and the name is a strong enough ache to send the pan clattering to the floor. Yellow, except now it’s splattered over the kitchen, sliding down cabinets, _you’re here,_ except she’s not. Hasn’t been, for decades. _How,_ she wonders, _can something hurt this much, after so long._

Yellow’s beautiful, though, even if it’s wrecked the cupboards. Yellow is a stronger reminder of the love of her life than any of the colours she’s yet seen.

Green’s more anticipated. Seven years later and she’s _wanted_ green, been peering at leaves and grass and her mint phone case for a _long_ time. She notices it straight away, when it arrives, though — red was similar enough to orange that it was a gradual realisation, and the same went for yellow — lifting her eyes from a book in the park and being flat out bowled away by the force of it. Jamie, the gardener, the woman with what Dani used to call a _green thumb_ — doesn’t cry, but it’s an almost sort of affair. Blinks once, stares at the grass in front of her as if it’ll fade again, twists around to check if the trees are doing the same thing. It’s the perfect time for it, this Indian summer, and the woods behind her are _achingly_ beautiful, stretching as they do into the greyscale sky. Her book’s dropped, forgotten entirely as she stands. It’s _mesmerising._ She never lost her passion for taking care of all of the plants she owns, not really, but here it comes flooding back, waves and waves of _oh, my god,_ as she steadies herself against the bench. There’s so _much_ of it in the world, so much more green than she’s ever seen of the other three colours, and it’s so deep a colour that she’s already lost in it, the way shadows seem to curl around the shade, afraid to touch so beautiful a thing.

It’s hard, tearing herself away from the park, but worth it eventually as she steps back into the Leafling and physically gasps. She could see roses, before, tulips and begonia if they came in the burning colours she’d come to know, but the stems, the leaves, some of the pots, even — it’s all _back._ The sky might still be grey, and the purple sweet peas in the front of the shop remain colourless — she can’t seem to make it matter, though, surrounded by this new colour she’d forgotten was her absolute favourite. She remembers, now. Remembers all of it.

 _Green,_ and it’s freedom — her and Dani sat breathless at the top of Stratton Mountain in the summer, the entire world folding about before them both in a way that made Jamie _wish_ she could paint, wish she could have it all locked onto a piece of paper as a memory. It’s envy — not of Dani so much as of Dani’s favourite dress, the ivy-coloured, just-shy-of-being-scandalously-short one that Jamie had loved, up until the hotter days when Dani would prance around the shop with it and Jamie would have to resist the urge to pin her against the very public front desk, trail a hand up an exposed thigh, kiss Dani absolutely senseless in front of any of the Leafling’s regulars. It’s an entire journey, though, too, a depiction of everything they’ve gone through — her green truck, parked outside of Bly every night for days, Dani reaching out across the chasm between them, Jamie’s barely controlled — _who the hell knew._ That same truck, driving them away from the one place she had ever learned to call home, Dani’s different-coloured eyes peering out at her as if Jamie would at any given moment change her mind entirely.

_You’re looking at me like I’m gonna throw you out the passenger seat._

Dani had grinned, but the tremble in her expression had betrayed her.

_Aren’t you?_

Jamie, pulling over, reaching to grasp hold of Dani’s hand as she could hope to anchor either of them.

_Not leaving you, Poppins. I promise._

A kiss, innocent until it wasn’t, both women leaning ever-so-slightly away from each other before some unsuspecting soul came across them making out like teenagers in the front seat of a car.

_Later, yeah?_

Later. The word had held such a huge promise that it was all Dani could do to nod.

Green, and Jamie’s stood in the middle of the Leafling until her legs ache, until she has to sit down and stare at it a little longer, the expanse of everything she’d forgotten. She’d never imagined a world without Dani to be describable as something beautiful, and yet.

Blue takes a while. A _long_ while, and Jamie’s going on eighty, giving up on the prospect of ever taking in a cloudless sky as easily as she’d given up on ever moving on from Dani Clayton. She’s staring at a photograph when she notices, though her senses aren’t quite as refined as they used to be — it takes her a minute to work it out. The photo, of course, is Dani. An attempted ‘selfie’, as today’s kids would call it, unsteady hands and the added difficulty of trying to take a photo and suppress a laugh at the same time resulting in something that’s a little more blurry than either would’ve preferred. It had summed them up though, in an accidental sort of fashion, the way they were still grinning through the slight haze, as filled with that unquenchable excitement as they always had been. A minute passes, and _oh_. Oh.

The last time she’d seen two eyes — one blue, one brown — they’d been staring, unblinking, from a lakebed. That, not-so-coincidentally, was the last time she’d seen colour for a _bloody_ long time, too.

Blue’s not such a kind shade to her, as the rest of them.

Because blue — it’s sadness, really. Not much else to it, an entire pool to fall into, sink, keep sinking, drown before you can remember to breathe.

No memories come to mind, apart from one. A night, a day, a plane, a lake.

A body.

A ghost.

Jamie drops the photo, can’t bring herself to bend down, pick it back up. It flutters to the floor in far more graceful a fashion than she does, hands clasped to her chest as she sobs, and sobs, and sobs. _Dani,_ and for the first time it strikes Jamie just how long she’s lived, without the love of her life to guide her. The colours seem too _loud,_ now, rearing and arching into each other, a cacophony that she can’t bear to open her eyes and look at because these are shades that _Dani_ introduced to her, shades she doesn’t want to ever see again without her lover by her side. _Dani,_ again, and this time the word tears like a spark from her lips, over and over and over because oh _god._ Every memory, creeping up on her all at once. All of these years — forty, four _fucking_ decades alone — strike Jamie’s frail, trembling body, a fire that her own spark has lit. She’d let it consume her, she knows.

Jamie — she’s seventy-nine. Seventy-nine, and yet suddenly she’s thirty-six again, howling into Owen’s chest as he holds her, cradles her, aches alongside the broken woman for all that is lost.

_I promised her years, Owen. We were going to have years together._

Owen’s flown over from France. It’s taken him short of a day to get here, and when he did, she was waiting, trussed like a corpse into the mud on the side of the lake. She’s been saying this, over and over, _I promised her years,_ and all he can do is nod, hold her tighter again, try and fail not to worry about how violently she’s shaking.

 _It’s okay,_ he doesn’t say, because he’s been here. Been in this exact situation, sobbing over a woman he was so prepared to spend his whole life with.

 _Give her those years,_ he whispers, and for a moment, she stills. Shifts again. Burrows further into him, as shattered as he’s ever seen her.

_She’d want you to have them, Jamie._

_She’d want you to live, for her._

Jamie sits up. She’s seventy-nine again, joints frailer, mind quieter than it was forty years ago. She _has_ lived, though, it occurs to her. Lived, and lived, and lived, and there is _something_ telling her, now, that she’s seen all she needs to see. There’s someone, more—

There’s someone telling her to come home.

Jamie tugs herself gently from the floor, takes a moment to gather herself, shifts between the sheets of this bed she still owns; the bed she’d once shared with Dani. There isn’t much to say goodbye to, as she glances around the flat — her plants, and she hopes someone’ll give them a better life than this — no. Not much at all.

It’s a simple act, is shutting her eyes. Minutes pass, and she’s sleeping, breaths evening out until it’s less of an _even_ and more of a _slow,_ slowing and slowing until her chest isn’t rising or falling at all.

She’ll wake, in a different place. She’ll wake in a bed in Bly, twenty-three again, old as she was when she first met Dani — and if this is death, she’s not sure why so many people are afraid of it. There’ll be a woman, sat at the end of her bed, one with tousled blonde hair, a smile which puts the stars to shame, two blue eyes which remind Jamie that _no,_ blue isn’t a sad colour at all.

 _Hey,_ she’ll whisper, and Dani — this version of Dani, the one she _can_ spend forever with, if this is indeed death — will turn.

Jamie registers two things at once. One, Dani’s wearing the same purple knit sweater she was sporting all those years ago, when two pairs of unfamiliar eyes met for the first time.

Two; purple.

Purple, and it’s the last colour.

Purple, and it’s Jamie’s favourite discovery of all of them.

The world — it’s brighter than she’s ever seen it. Every _single_ thing, complete.

“Hannah and Owen are waiting for us downstairs,” Dani whispers back.

 _This,_ Jamie thinks, as she grabs Dani’s hand and allows herself to be dragged through these corridors — _this is what it’s like._

_Coming home._

**Author's Note:**

> does this make any sense?? to anyone??? i've yet to beta my own work so if you see any glaring mistakes please let me know — comments never fail to make my entire week, so feel free to drop one in if you want ;)


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